It is I, Seagull
It is I, dawn and wing
It is I, dissolving into We
who refuse to let each other go
Eyes dead center in the storm
Eyes open
Eyes not looking away
Up here the view is blue crystalline
vivid as your child’s breath upon the face
High above the low white squall
Our earth’s arc looks back
asks if the eyes can hold more
than old fictions in
I / black and white / I
you / fire and exile / you
with or against
On the edge
of the breath’s resistance: Lift.
Life’s bodies in bloom
Bright spectra of colors
rise up in trajectories wider than
these tiny histories
Your flight lets them know
what they didn’t know
someone like you could do
My grandmother lived
in a world she could not read
not realizing that it takes
a lifetime to understand
the language of her hands
that my books have no translation for
hopes battered & boiled in hot chili oil
that while code is binary
our wholeness cannot be
confined to the poverty of numbers
and small talk about the weather
as a means for safety
of staying out of sight
What names do you carry with you
in the slow skyward burn
What forces push up against
your mettle and shine
Today vs. the downward pull
Today vs. another body into the ground
Today vs. legacy marred
by man’s mistakes
To what devotion do you circle
with the lens of each year
Who do you tend to with the pine air
passing through the day lung
What do you release without regret
from the night’s ghost lung?
Our maps blood drawn
point us far beyond the orange haze
of sun-collapsed empires
Daughter diaspora
Son of samaya
This is your time
to be seen
to be seen
to be seen
to be seen
